Style Chronicler

Last week, on a blustery Wednesday evening, an eclectic crowd of New Yorkers gathered outside of Film Forum for the premiere of “Bill Cunningham New York,” a documentary about the eighty-one-year-old Times street photographer and fashion journalist, whose columns have gained such an avid following in the past three decades. The crowd at the theatre represented a rich sampling of the city’s sartorially exuberant. There stood the small, elderly lady wearing the vintage lepidote crescent hat and black capelet; the former U.N. diplomat attired in an abstract eighties print jacket and tailored pants; the willowy fashion blogger garbed in a lipstick red shawl and slate skirt.

They all filed into the theatre and a reverent hush fell over the audience as the film began. Cunningham, who came to New York in 1948 after a semester at Harvard, began taking pictures for the Times in the early seventies. As Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute curator Harold Korda notes in the film, “Street style emerged at the same point that Bill got a camera.” In an interview in 2002, former Times managing editor Arthur Gelb credited Cunningham with revolutionizing the paper’s street photography: “[It] was a breakthrough for the Times, because it was the first time the paper had run pictures of well-known people without getting their permission.” In an article he wrote for the Times eight years ago, Cunningham observed,

I realized that you didn’t know anything unless you photographed the shows and the street, to see how people interpreted what designers hoped they would buy… I suppose, in a funny way, I’m a record keeper… But I never go out with a preconceived idea. I let the street speak to me.

The puckish Cunningham is famously private and his ascetic lifestyle is often intriguingly at odds with the flourish of his subject matter. The film follows him as he darts around the city on his Schwinn bicycle, looking for the perfect shot. During the Q. & A. which followed the screening, director Richard Press said that it took eight years to convince Cunningham to do the film, and then another two years to shoot and edit it. “It was always a dance getting his cooperation, even during filming,” Mr. Press said. “We tried to be as invisible as possible.” Lauren Collins, who wrote a profile of Cunningham in the magazine two years ago, noted that “his sensibility is exhilaratingly democratic. He takes wonder, and whimsy, where he finds it…”

And he lets the streets speak to him—in their cacophony, their subdued pitch, and their dissonant inflections. Truman Capote once remarked that the greatest pleasure in writing is “the inner music that words make.” Similarly, Cunningham’s work reveals the rhythm of the street, capturing for millions of New Yorkers their unique notes of sartorial creativity and the delight they take in reimagining themselves each day.

I spoke with Hilton Als about Cunningham earlier this week, and he pointed me to an old essay of his, in which he’d described an encounter with the famed photographer. Als had approached Cunningham at his favorite corner—Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue—and asked him about his residency at the Carnegie Hall Studios, where he and several other tenants were about to be displaced.

But Cunningham wouldn’t let that potentially negative news cloud his vision. “Oh, that,” he said, smiling, his eyes darting here and there. “Listen, chile, who has time to worry about that when there’s so much to photograph?”

Erin Overbey is the chief archivist of The New Yorker. She has been an archivist at the magazine since 1995.